


One

by orphan_account



Category: Black Lagoon
Genre: Gen, Paramilitary, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-14
Updated: 2010-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:16:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Base camp was known to get all sorts of new cadets, but Rosarita was something else altogether. An ally? A foe? It didn't matter. She was an unnerving factor, an enigma that no one wanted to get too close to find out about.</p><p>She was One.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Whisperslip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whisperslip/gifts).



Middle of the Andean jungle base was where it's all happening. September every year this odd excitement filled the camp, knowing that a new truck load was coming. Off with the camo hat, on with the fake beard. For a brief moment, the wild renegades transform into worldly sages. Read the faces, predict the futures.

When the future FARC soldiers were still in their zygotic forms gathered around for the first time, the veterans liked to circle around the fresh meat and make bets on what the new kids would become. That histrionic one would end up in the political office. That one with the daring smirk would rack up the body count and love every moment of it. The scrawny one who sweats far too easily would not live past his first handful of battles.

Some of the best cadets were the ones born with a blood thirsty streak, the others either eventually convert into the joy of killing or acknowledge that was going to be their life and get on with it. Let it be gleefulness or slight hesitation, neither came within the same postcode as This One.

There, the tall, light-skinned cadet far too young to be called a woman, far too tainted to be called a girl. Trying to read her was like staring in the face of a black hole, an exercise deemed futile before it was began.

Dramatic it may sound, the vets didn't live this long without at least some traces of danger probing intuition and every single one of the instinct was telling them to run, This One was trouble.

There were rumours about the Naturals. To them, killing was not an choice, because they had never been an alternative. The instinct was the reason that they exist, the need of taking lives itched into their DNA. This was how they were programmed to function, they had as much conscious decision as fire could decide whether it would burn. Most had wrote off the existence of Naturals as exaggeration born out of the need of military bravado, an arbitrary used as some form of ambition fuel.

Then they met This One.

Staring in the face of one dispelled the doubt right there. No body felt the need to witness This One in action to know that this was it. A vibration of signal, and she was ready for destruction. This One was a vole, a hurricane of death ready to rip apart anything coming in contact. Whether that made her the best or worst soldier was up for debate.

“ _Wonder where her loyalty lies_ ” was the topic of more than one hushed cigarette whispers. Never mind amok, being a blood bath taker would be her natural state. Without a chain, killing all of the in her sleep was the expectation. True that they had a recruiting quota to meet, but it was commonly agreed that having her in was one call of desperation.

The seasoned guerillas left standing were almost always dead on in character assessment. In one month it was proven that This One was born to exterminate.

They needed ruthlessness, but they needed it as a trait soldiers not rabid jackals. The latter were too likely to count as liability to their already declining force. There was a reason that PENT was the choice of explosion, This One had questionable inertness comparable to liquid nitroglycerine. There was a reason that it wasn't on the list of ideal weapons even though no body ever doubt its ability to crash, burn and leave a beautiful looking crater.

It was up to discussion whether she was evolved into most primal kind of animalistic hunter, or the most advanced robotic killing machine advanced beyond organic means. Either way, she was a creature that could not be called human even compared against the type of humans drawn to paramilitary, who considered snapping necks as natural and routinely banal as to eat or breathe.

This One had the complete package slipped with gift in laser guided intuition and screamingly acute senses, then there was the stamina and tolerance. The training was about pushing the mess of meat bags far above the limits that they ever thought was possible, that in six months those rural children would be turned into steel hard fighters. With This One, it was like trying to see how far the chewing gum could stretch before they snap.

For the initial stamina assessment, the new kids were put through an infinite loop of run until they drop. This One kept on running for thirty six hours and forty seven minutes, until the other squads complained about the new recruit hogging the tracks and the subsequent higher up order on stopping the test and vacate the damn field.

With the mandatory simulation torture chamber, it was as futile as trying to provoke a reaction from a sack of concrete. The nookie torturer gave up. The mid-level inquisitor burned out. Their top professional extravacators passed out in dehydration before a hint of stoicism was chipped away from This One.

This One was a rare gift indeed. She was fast tracked, in two months it was decided that she would specialise as an assassin. Not exactly a secret that assassins were an special breed, the people so focused they bypassed the tunnel vision straight into the realm of pin vision. The only people who were serious enough to need a spreadsheet to decide what jam to have in the morning. Just to imagine her having jam, that was already a level up in This One's humanity.

One month after that she was on assignments. In the time when her cohorts was deemed field competent, This One already made the honour in the form of Most Wanted list. This One was now The One.

Out of the unlikely tall tales, then there was the camp rumour was that she passed every psych assessments with flying colours. In fact, according to yet another cigarettes gossip, apparently she spoke in complete clear sentences and pledged her loyalty when asked regard to whether she'd like to go through the highly specialised route. Jokes about porky pilots were mandatory in accompany of that story, or the teller would be seen as crazier than The One herself.

Just like any other so-called “camp-cest” rumours it was taken with a whole container of salt. Some of The One's contemporaries still made sure their doors and windows were trapped every night before sleep, just in case if The One slept-walked into killing them all with her bare hands.

It was a routine clap dance, more for their peace of mind than practicality. Not that anyone was naïve enough to seriously believe that a few tin box nail mines would deter The One if she ever wanted to slay. Nor that they were egotistical enough to sincerely believe they were actually on her radar.

A true sad state was to know that it was not because anyone was sure about her loyalty. Rather because thankfully, the killer of the most efficient order did not waste time or efforts on mere noises. Her sanity and reliability was still up on heated debates, by then there were never doubts on her focus. They were not targets, amen. They were not worthy

Being deemed as target by The One would be the twin package of the uttermost compliment and sure incompatibility with life, the trade-off that most were not ready to receive. Not that anyone were fearful of death, rather it was the matter of how to meet their end. Dying in the heat of battle was expected and even honorable. Expiring by getting on The One's wrong side was as much of a waste as intentionally sticking a fork into the power socket. Fatality guaranteed. Pointless waste .

Life in the jungle went on. New batch of wide eyed children and adolescents came in with promises of honour, fortune, and more cocaine than they ever dared to dream. Fresh bags of bodies went out to the ditch, the luckier ones even had been fully covered. With the short cycles of era within the military base, stories were born, told from the last generation of soldiers to the next in the same way as village elders telling stories to the children.

Instead of decades it took for a tale to turn into legend and then myth, it was only a few years before The One's status was elevated into one of such.

The One became No One, an jungle legend of a phantom. No One was revered and feared on either side of the firing line. No One must still worked, because everyone would know if that changed given her status. She might be on our side now, but for how long? Rumour mill was quiet for years to come, like Bloody Mary, if she was not mentioned then the soldiers could fool themselves into thinking that No One did really exist.

When No One went AWOL, the pressurized silence finally reached to the point of explosion. The panic was palatable in the air, thickened with dread and apprehension. Was it appropriate to address the misplaced metaphoric human nuclear warhead “No One”? It didn't matter, it was terrifyingly accurate if not taken in a bitter twist. The rumours were animated to the max, turned up to so high it fell off the dial.

No One had been unstable for months, restrained only by further assassination orders.

No One filled her bread with diazepam paste instead of butter, or was it oxycodone or Ritalin?

No One was not issued a weapon for two years, she just use whatever that was available and never failed a target.

No One didn't need to be physically involved to kill anymore, she only had to say the targets' name and the soul would depart from their hosts' nostrils.

No One punched out a swarm of killer whales, all while being tied to an electric chair under water.

No One walked through the ruins of Chernobyl, where nuclear waste parted their way on front of her like what Red Sea was on front of Moses.

The only thing for sure, was that not a single fact about No One was concrete. The invisible clutch, the enigmatic force that terrorised, then subconsciously controlled the camp. The pride of fearless fighters had to be shelved, it was hard to take the piss out of their mates' new-found paranoia themselves were looking behind their shoulders with every step too.

The soldiers served with No One hadn't been the dirty faced street rats for years now. The ones left over were now true FARC fighters, elite among the elite. The theatrical Leandro was now indeed a semi-successful pen pusher among the food chain. The sadistic smug José died after being stabbed by a broken bottle in a bar fight before stepping into his first guerillas battle. The former nervous wreck Andrés was now the man to go to if anyone needed to shoot dozens of gas cylinder mortars into the government schools, then he'd go home and read to his two daughters and kissed them good night.

People weren't about to forget about predictions on her either, everyone questioned No One's loyalty back then. The common consensus was that this ticking time bomb going rogue was the written in the stars, the only variable was when. No One was the “I Told You So” that could not be savoured, not when it was like acknowledging one's own death, no point in denying but it didn't mean anyone was ready when the reaper stared them back right in their face.

Some of the soldiers started booby-trapping their houses again each night, not that they were any more convinced it was effective than they were back in the days. Still they kept on doing it anyway.

Suddenly there was this desperate wish to be invisible, disposable, unimportant again, for that the veil of being a more noise in the field of No One was the only sure defence. In exchange for the prestige they get to stay alive, what could be a fairer trade?

What they didn't know was that their terror was indeed unnecessary. For all intends and purpose, No One was dead. In her place, a new maid of Lovelace was born. Who would know that someone who could dissect and reassemble an AK-47 blind-folded in less than ten seconds couldn't make a pot of drinkable tea if her life was depended on it?

Not that it mattered. After all, No One was merely a legend that probably never existed. Not a figure she would grieve for anyway. Not for that now she had a real purpose for the first time in her life, to safe guard the most precious.

With all the uncanny character reading intuitions, veterans had been wrong about her after all. She was never the wild beast that was untamable, or the a principle less exterminator. There always had been a leash. A leash that had been changed into a new reluctant hand, but it was always there, always anchored, as effective as it ever was.

Rumour mills failed at getting this one vital information, one that could saved many sleepless nights. All along, she knew where her loyalty lied. She was a bloodhound, a dog fused to her master. She served, she protected.

She was never acting alone, nor she ever saw herself as anything but a tool at dispense. Beyond all that, here always had been more than just One.

**Author's Note:**

> Mandatory apologies for my English. Not an excuse, but if it does burn you it was not my intention. No apologies for my New Zealand spelling. Black Lagoon is international after all.
> 
> Sad to say that by the time I finished this work, it was nothing like the prompt's expectations. Indeed I managed a pre-canon piece, it was just nothing like what I hoped it to be like. I found Roberta by far the hardest character to write for in the BL verse, as I can follow the inner thinking pattern of most other characters but not her.
> 
> Maybe if it comes I will write another piece that suits the prompt a little better. I wouldn't count on it though, it felt outside of my ability.


End file.
